On Stage

...Glenn is a very different assignment, though the maniacal streak Harris exhibited as Shepard's incestuous lover and as the mercenary in Under Fire is eerily appropriate for the fervently patriotic astronaut...

...Then we have two government recruit-ers(Jeff Goldblum, whose gangly goofi-ness is becominga bit of a bore, and Harry Shearer), bumbling in a way that reveals less about bureaucrats than about Hollywood's image of them...

...Near the end, the director throws in a reception for the astronauts that includes a rather silly fan dance, intercut with a final assault by Yeager on the en-velope's by-now famous perimeter...

...For all of its shortcomings, though, The Right Stuff is an entertaining film -not art, but f un...

...he's become an icon...

...Yet as has just been pointedly demonstrated, Glenn's most heroic act is not risking his life, it is standing up for the woman he loves after she has stood up for herself...

...This seems like more padding, yet perhaps it is not just that...

...Do you think I'm a Dudley Do-Right...

...During his orbits, Glenn reports sightingamys-terious phenomenon that looks like a field of fireflies in outer space...

...But it's only a movie, after all...

...The Navy's Shepard doesn't like the Marine Corps' Glenn, who has his troubles with the Air Force's Grissom and Cooper...

...By the time he completes his landmark flight, Yeager has voluntarily passed on the mantle...

...Usually, however, there is a lot to watch, thanks to the special effects by Jordan Belson and Gary Gutierrez...

...he asks his wife, Annie(Mary Jo Desch-anel...

...Elsewhere in the picture, the way Glenn quite naturally comes to dominate the astronauts' first press conference by spouting the pieties of a sincere zealot shows off Harris' masterly comic timing...

...Carpenter, Slayton and Schirra are reduced to bit players...

...The unification process begins when the first American in space turns out to be a chimp named Ham...

...Indeed, the coun-terpointing of the twogroups seems like a literary device Wolfe jerry-rigged to connect their histories...

...I was delighted that Scott Glenn finally landed a part commensurate with his talents...

...I would not have made this judgment after seeing him in George Romero's unfortunate Knight Riders...

...Starring as Chuck Yeag-er, the test pilot who first broke the sound barrier in the X-l rocket plane in 1948, the playwright-turned-actor strides across the runways of Edwards Air Force Base like an impossibly attractive, self-confident combination of Clint Eastwood and John Wayne...

...Responding to a disparaging remark made by another test pilot, the first flier to reach Mach One defends the Mercury team: " It takes a special kind of man to volunteer for a suicide mission, especially when it's on TV...

...Not incidentally, the front lawn is covered with reporters...

...When Yeager breaks the sound barrier, we're practically in the cockpit with him...

...The intention of both is to contrast the largely forgotten, and magnificent, exploits of Yeager and the other early test pilots who "pushed the outside of the envelope" with the more celebrated, and overrated, achievements of their successors, the Mercury astronauts?Glenn (Ed Harris), Alan Shepard (Scott Glenn), Gus Grissom (Fred Ward), Deke Slayton (Scott Paulin), Scott Carpenter (Charles Frank), Wally Schirra (Lance Henriksen), and Gordon Cooper (Dennis Quaid...

...Everyone knows Wolfe is a novelist manque, and just as there's probably more entertainment than truth in his book, there's more fun than anything else in the film...

...It's the risk takers against the company men...

...Ronald Reagan never looked so good on the screen, and look where he wound up...

...Kaufman tries hard to connect this true historical incident to a make-believe ceremony on earth conducted by some aborigines in the Australian outback...

...A few of Kaufman's more heavy-handed touches could have been jettisoned, too, starting with the sundry anonymous symbolic characters...

...But by the middle of the film, when the scene has shifted from Edwards in the California desert to Cape Canaveral on the Florida coast, Yeager has stopped seeming like flesh and blood...

...But during the countdown for Glenn's initial, ultimately aborted launch, Vice President Lyndon Johnson (crudely portrayed by Donald Moffat) tries to bully his way into Annie's living room to join her in watching the televised coverage of the mission...

...The recreations of the Mercury missions are also stunningly authentic, and for a bonus there is some clever photography and editing that match the real John F. Kennedy, in news footage, with the film's Al Shepard at a White House ceremony...

...From the distance of two decades, it may be hard to give serious weight to Glenn's sentiments, or to the overall tone of the film-wASPish, crewcutted, macho, heroic, patriotic...

...in fact, I thought its conclusion was the film's, only to be disappointed...

...So even before Glenn's three orbits around the earth-at the end of which he is in danger of burning up because of a loose heat shield on his capsule-he is pictured as a true hero...

...As for Kaufman's "permanent press corps," the less said the better...

...Apparently Kaufman didn't think we knew we were watching men risk their lives...

...I was equally glad about the casting of Quaid, who was so striking as the bitter ex-quarterback in Breaking Away, as well as in his one starring role, the brawler in Tough Enough...

...And our human sympathies have passed to the astronauts, who paradoxically seem both more cliche and more real...

...When he says, "I'm a lonely beacon of self-restraint in this cult of car crazies," the eyes flashing wildly out of his aggressive, bullet-shaped head prove that he believes it, and that he doesn't care if everyone else resents him for being a "gung-ho type...

...For years he has been one of the best supporting actors around (he stole Urban Cowboy from John Travolta), and his one previous shot at a lead was in a confused film called The Challenge...

...Of course, The Right Stuff really belongs to Sam Shepard and Ed Harris...

...The other extreme of the connubial experience is well represented by Betty Grissom (Veronica Cartwright) and Trudy Cooper (Pamela Reed...

...The actresses playing the astronauts' wives, for example, are uniformly excellent...

...Harris, in the more demanding role of Glenn, leaves little doubt that he has become one of the leading actors of this generation...

...Cartwright is not afraid to have Betty appear shrewish when she is speaking her mind about the astronauts (" Sometimes they' re such assholes") or expressing her bitter disappointment at the relative failure of her husband's mission...

...The episode with Yeager does give his story line an idiotic and unnecessary sense of closure...

...Yet factionalism still periodically rears its head through the first two manned flights-Shepard's, which ends in triumph, and Grissom's, which finishes with his capsule downed in the drink...

...For the most part, the interservice rivalry is manifested in the kind of horseplay that fills countless boot camp comedies-macho one-upmanship, crude practical jokes, racial and sexual bantering...

...So the comparison between the astronauts and the test pilots becomes a little fuzzy...

...She does, with some amusement...

...The key to the whole enterprise is the producers, Robert Chartoff and Irwin Winkler, previously responsible for, among other movies, Rocky...

...Nor does Reed hold back anything in displaying the grimly ironic detachment the estranged Mrs...

...At the outset, the astronauts feud among themselves...

...To the surprise of no one save the nasa brass, Glenn's fellow astronauts back him up-and the audience cheers...

...Then the seven discover a common enemy: n asa officialdom, and especially, the German emigre scientists in charge of the Mercury program, who believe "the so-called astronaut would be redundant," since monkeys "are more cooperative...

...Chartoff and Winkler had the good sense to seek out superior performers down to the supporting roles...

...Annie, a terribly shy woman with a speech impediment, resists, and Glenn reacts with outrage upon learning of LBJ's attempted grandstanding...

...The unequal performance fans the dissension, particularly among the astronauts' wives, shown as living pretty much in their husbands' reflected light...

...He shows up early in the film at a test pilot's funeral, and later at a countdown at the Cape...

...And he does so impressively, rendering believable a heroism that at times borders on foolhardiness...

...But the movie's greatest strength is the acting...

...But since then he has delivered one impressive performance on stage in Fool for Love (written by none other than Sam Shepard), and one on film in the otherwise negligible Under Fire...

...Ward is no less impressive in unhesitatingly exhibiting the dark side of the optimistic spirit of the space age...

...with their juvenile humor, they are simply unabashedly commercial...

...The brotherhood of the seven is finally cemented by the unlikely figure of Glenn, who had until then been seen by the others-and presented to the audience-as an impossibly clean Marine...

...Emerging from The Right Stuff after more than three hours, it is difficult to avoid feeling that Yeager and his bunch could have been cut, leaving a manageably-sized movie about the Mercury program...

...As Stanley Kauffmann noted, Shepard has evolved into the actor who best embodies the spirit of his own plays-the mythical "true West," the ethos of the courageous loner...

...The problem is that Yeager seems to have loped in from another movie, even though the screenplay by Philip Kaufman, who also directed, is pretty faithful to Tom Wolfe's best-selling book...

...Still, the men are the stars of The Right Stuff...

...But it is more likely to make a serious candidate-for an Oscar, if not theOval Office-outof Sam Shepard...

...They shrewdly rehired the composer/arranger from that surprise blockbuster, Bill Conti, so our Mercury spacemen soar to the strains of "Anchors Aweigh," "Stars and Stripes," "TheHallelujahChorus," and inciden-tal brass-and-string accompaniment that keeps your pulse beating even when nothing's happening on the screen...

...Cooper feels from what she correctly perceives as her husband's adolescent hijinks...

...In the role of Yeager, he is playing the part of himself that lives in the characters he creates...

...Deschanel isquietly dignified in a part that could easily have slipped into unbecoming pathos...

...There is, for instance, a preacher (Royal Da-no), anachronistically outfitted in the black hat and tails familiar from Hollywood westerns...

...Although some critics have praised Kaufman for making the characterizations ironic, they aren't...

...Most of Kaufman's attempts at profundity are no more successful...

...Here he brings to life the little-boy spirit that, one suspects, animates most of his character's he-man carryings-on...

...The effect is hardly illuminating...